After the Lord Mayor's Parade

...comes the man with the bucket and shovel. We know what that means. Pay back time.

This vernal euphoria, this woosh of pretty-pretty green, froth of fronds' unfoldings, skies the blue of a song thrush egg, flicked with cloud and mornings licked with wet. Sometimes a chill in the air but then it's only nearly-May. I'm beginning to sound like Cold Comfort Farm's fey Elfine. See me skip through field and dingle!

But ha! Indoors a thin film a dust has settled over anything horizontal. Glass is smeared. Fingermarks besmirch. Short of old Adam Lambsbreath from that same novel cletterin' those great old dishes with they ol' thorn twigs, this could well be 'Cold Comfort Farm'....this is grim indeed; in blog-speak: OMG :-(

So enough of this 'hey nonny no' whimsy: the household gods must be appeased. Beds to be stripped and changed, floors swept briskly and brusquely. Away with dust and winter's grime! Be gone you beetles! Spiders get thee hence! Dogs retreat to the sanctuary of their beds, little knowing that they may be swept from them at any time as the wave of cleanliness takes everything in its path.

Laundry is sorted and stuffed into The Machine. Detergent added, buttons pushed and I feel the satisfaction of a job well done. But too soon afterwards comes a sound so terrible that both dogs leap, barking with shock and horror from those beds. It is the death rattle of a washing machine.

Which is why shortly afterwards my laundry and I are to be found towards the bottom of a learning curve in a launderette in Welshpool's High Street. I am unfamiliar with the etiquette of the Launderette. For example - if you need to use a machine can you remove someones washed washing to put your own in? The old geezer with the sports bag and next in line said he wouldn't, and he wouldn't want anyone to move his washing either. But we both kind-of-agreed, well it was up to me.....so I took the pragmatic approach and unloaded a load of towels which really should have been washed separately. (For heaven's sake - red and white together?) I stuffed my own stuff in and blundered on to the next unknown - that of getting the machine to Go. A kind girl told me, as if instructing a half-wit, how to put in both powder and money; which and how much went in, and where. I did as I was told meekly. I stood gawping for a long time waiting for the 'fabric conditioner light' to come on. It never did, so we managed without.

I sat in the sun watching the washing and Welshpool's world go by. Inside the hum of machine and sloshing water, the whirr of the spin cycle and that hot fabric smell from the bank of dryers on the wall. Outside, shoppers dipped in and out of Woolworths and clucked together beside the Market Hall. A slight breeze brought a freshness to an otherwise warm spring day.

......A slight breeze, which should the tumble dryer fail too, will come in very handy.